Saturday, April 28, 2012

A man with a concealed carry permit stopped a knife wielding man during a stabbing rampage, allowing other store patrons to subdue the suspect and hold him for police. Said Salt Lake City Police Lt. Brian Purvis:

"This was a really volatile situation that could have gotten even worse," Purvis said. "(The bystander) was definitely in the right place at the right time."

Dozens of other shoppers, who too could have become victims, are also thankful for the gun carrying man. And many, like Danylle Julian, are still in shock from the experience. "Scary actually. Really scary. Five minutes before I walk out to my car. It could have been me."

I have added this incident to my page listing 40 examples of armed citizens defending themselves in public places. Yet more proof that concealed carry works and makes people safer.

Update: 4/29/2012:

Well it did not take long for my favorite anti-gun fanatic to comment on the incident cited in the original article:

In response to a comment made on my last post, I found myself remembering all of the times I have posted about people shooting themselves with their own guns in and around grocery stores. The comment was in response to a gun permit holder who held someone at bay who had stabbed some folks at a grocery store. I wondered what the point of sending me the article was and one commenter noted that "Because everyone knows you don't need a gun at the grocery store." Sarcasm.

No, Joan, the point is to show that sometimes guns in public can serve a useful purpose. But Joan Peterson will never admit that this is true even part of the time because that would blow her entire thesis for supporting her main goal: eliminating public carry of firearms.

Sunday, April 22, 2012

How many licenses to carry (LTC) a concealed weapon exist in the
United States? I have often wondered what this number might be
because I have believed for a long time that LTC holders have become
the largest constituency for change in gun laws across the nation, a
constituency that is overlooked by most in the media in favor of the
more visible NRA, and a constituency that is studiously ignored by
the anti-gun organizations because the number of LTC holders dwarfs
the embarrassingly small numbers of members and direct supporters
that anti-gun organizations can claim.

Calculating the number of LTC holders is more difficult than it
seems. While presumably every issuing authority knows how many LTCs
it has issued and how many are active, not all are required by law to
report LTC statistics to the public. This is particularly true in
those states that issue LTCs through county sheriffs offices, but it
is also true in several other states as well. In addition the number
of active LTCs is constantly changing as more people apply for LTCs
and are approved, as more states become shall-issue, and as LTCs are
revoked. Many people hold more than one LTC because the lack of
nationwide reciprocity prevents one LTC being used in every states.
Arizona, Florida, and Utah non-resident LTCs are very popular for
this purpose. No estimate of LTCs will include the number of people
legally carrying concealed weapons in those states that do not
require a permit to do so, which include Arizona, Alaska, Vermont,
and Wyoming. Any attempt to calculate the number of active LTCs in
existence will result only in an estimate.

The best source for an estimate of the number of LTCs that I have
seen is the CCW
Statistics page of the Legally
Armed website. All fifty states are covered, and sources are
cited. The authors of this site have gone to great lengths to
contact issuing agencies that do not publish statistics publicly to obtain LTC
statistics from an official source. When that is not possible, a news
media article is cited instead. The site is also updated regularly
when new information becomes available. Adding all the numbers for
the states listed on this page one arrives at a figure of 7,412,049.

It is the nature of anti-gun rights organizations to dispute all
claims about the popularity of firearms and legal carry. Their view
is that these activities are engaged in by an increasingly smaller
group of citizens and that guns will someday be so rare as to be
unusual in society. They certainly do not want to admit or encourage
guns to become normalized in modern American society. In order to
come up with a number of LTCs that could be defended by citing
authoritative sources, I attempted to repeat the exercise of the
Legally Armed CCW Statistics page, but to use only publicly available
sources from issuing authorities. Naturally this number would be
smaller than the Legally Armed figure, but it may be more
authoritative because it can be checked by anyone. Using the Legally
Armed CCW Statistics page as a starting point, I attempted to find
more up to date numbers from issuing authorities and arrived at the
number 4,410,564 active LTCs nationwide.

What can we conclude from this? First, the legally armed populace
in the United States is a large group. It is at least 7,400,000, and
not smaller than 4,400,00 perhaps as high as 8.5
million. This compares to an reported NRA
membership of 4.3 million, AARP
membership of 40 million, and labor union
membership of 14.8 million. While not the largest political
demographic, numbers this large can and do have an effect on
elections, and it while is may not be publicly acknowledged, I think
politicians are paying attention to these numbers. Why is it that
President Obama has stayed away from covert anti-gun efforts? These
numbers are one good reason, besides the NRA, politicians avoid
controversy on this issue.

Friday, April 20, 2012

This
week, in
a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Judiciary
Chairman Patrick Leahy, Senate Diane Feinstein (D – CA) described
the reasons for her opposition to two concealed carry reciprocity
bills currently in the Senate:

"Imagine
that a man who has been convicted of a domestic violence crime
against a woman he had been dating seeks — and obtains — a permit
to carry a concealed firearm from his state of residence," she
wrote. "Under the concealed carry reciprocity bills, he could
legally travel across state lines and confront his former girlfriend
..."

Comments and articles decrying the apparent
cluelessness of this scenario have sprouted up all over the
blogosphere, many people incredulous over Feinsteins idiocy. First,
Diane Feinstein is not an idiot. She is actually very smart,
and I am sure that she is familiar with the laws the result in one
becoming a prohibited person for firearm possession: she wrote or
sponsored many of them.

The
above statement is actually a cunning appeal to a certain class
of voter, especially women, voters who are ignorant of gun laws and
who will accept the scenario without questioning it. Feinsteins
real goal here is to head-off a California problem: the horror of
people people from flyover country carrying concealed weapons in
California. What would happen if (or, more likely, when) people
started carrying concealed weapons in California and no Wild West
Shootouts happened? Would the people of California demand shall-issue
or themselves? What would happen nationally if California went
shall-issue? Is is just possible that entire debate over
concealed carry would be over?

Take
a look at two maps that illustrate the types of concealed carry
permits systems adopted by the various states. Here is one
from 1992, the year Feinstein was elected to the Senate:

and here
is another from 2011, the last year that the status of a state
changed.

Quite a change, almost a complete reversal! Only Illinois among the fifty states still bars public carry of concealed weapons, and only California, New York, and a handful of Eastern states still have may-issue laws, laws that are often interpreted by authorities to result in de-facto no-issue, especially California, which has only 37465 current concealed weapons licenses.

Diane Feinstein
is well aware of these maps, and what they mean politically for
gun control, an issue very near her heart, in which a handgun ban was
highly desired:

"If
I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for
an outright ban, picking up every one of them . . . Mr. and
Mrs. America, turn 'em all in, I would have done it. I could not do
that. The votes weren't here."--
60 Minutes, Feb. 5, 1995.

What
would happen to gun control as a political issue if California, one
of the last great bastions limiting concealed carry (Illinois and New
York being the other two) were to change from yellow to blue on the
map? I think Feinstein fears that gun control would be truly
dead.

About Me

I am an Electrical Engineering graduate that has worked as a software engineer in the telecommunications industry and as a test engineer in the mass storage industry.
I have always has an interest in environmental issues, but am dismayed at the utter lack of scientific or technical knowledge expressed by many people involved in environmental causes. This blog is an attempt to address the deficiency.